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Google Search broke a new record during the 2022 FIFA World Cup Final
Search traffic spiked to a 25-year high on Sunday
The 2022 FIFA World Cup is officially over, with Argentina pipping 2018 champions France to clinch the title on Sunday. Google was well prepared for the sporting spectacle ahead of its start with detailed data on matches, standings, and a nifty penalty shootout game on Search to get the hype going before the tournament. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has now revealed that Search managed to record its highest-ever traffic on the day of the final, a significant landmark in its two-and-a-half decade-long existence.
You don't mess with soccer hooligans, so YouTube TV is looking to make it right after an outage during the World Cup earlier this week. Many of those affected by the outage say they've received emails from YouTube that promise a week of free service as compensation. That's not bad for a rather brief interruption.
Viber is getting into the World Cup spirit. The popular instant messaging platform has announced a feature that will allow users to make predictions about the outcomes of World Cup matches, along with a specially-made soccer-themed sticker pack and prizes for accurate predictions.
Yesterday, at its second annual Google for Brazil event, the company revealed both future plans and updates for its products and services in the country. If you remember, last year Google made a similar set of announcements for Indonesia, and now it's Brazil's turn. The details released cover the range from amusing to useful, with a bit of philanthropic education mixed in, too.
Unless you've been living under a rock in recent weeks, you may have heard about some soccer thing that's happening soon (football, to those of us this side of the Atlantic). The 2018 FIFA World Cup is almost upon us, and Google has some tricks up its sleeve to assist fans around the globe. As the tournament kicks off with Russia vs Saudi Arabia next Thursday, new features in the Google app will help you keep up with all the action. Other Google products will also be on hand to improve the experience, including Assistant, News, Trends, and Maps.
Cricket. Cricket. That's the one like baseball, but with the flat bats and a circular field and a ton of players and black tea afterwards, right? I apologize - as an American it's hard for me to concentrate on sports that don't involve constant concussions and commercial breaks every two minutes. But I am reliably informed that Cricket is enjoyed in Britain and all the places that used to be Britain (except this one). For all of those people, the International Cricket Council has teamed up with the UK arm of Indian publisher Reliance Big Entertainment to offer an official World Cup fantasy app.
Motorola's newer phones have a lot of little touches that improve the overall experience, one of which is the boot services app. Sounds boring, right? Well, it is most of the time. The exception being days like today when Motorola uses boot services to push out a new boot animation. This time it's got a World Cup theme.
HTC packages an IR blaster into its high-end phones and ships a dedicated app that taps into the hardware. HTC Sense TV, as the app is called, doesn't just change channels, it sucks show listings out of cable boxes and crams them onto smartphone screens. An update has recently rolled out support for Indian TV guides. Indian-based blog Razzil has shared some screens of this beta feature in action.
Google's really been on a roll lately when it comes to Google Now... or at least our readers have been especially good at spotting features that we hadn't before. As the 2014 World Cup draws ever nearer, Google has added the various competing national soccer (all non-Americans, read: football) teams to the integrated sports updates already seen for most of the major league sports in the US. Now you don't need a separate app for score updates and news, unless you're the picky type who likes things like content or videos.
Starting now, looking up information about the World Cup within the Google Search app will pull up specific details on who's playing where, who's competing next, and who's beating whom. The World Cup takes off next week, and rather than installing a dedicated app just to get the basics, Google has you covered.
The number of weeks between us and this year's World Cup are wilting away, which makes now the time to get prepared. Snag some tickets to Brazil if you can, or, more practically, go snatch up the new Android App ESPN has just released for keeping tags on all of the goings-on. This way you don't even have to watch the games to know who's kicking whose butts, and how hard.
In two months, hundreds of thousands of people will be flocking to cities all over Brazil for the 20th FIFA World Cup. Since getting around in an unfamiliar metropolis can be a bit of a hassle (looking at you, Barcelona), Google has expanded its public transit information for the relevant Brazilian cities. When World Cup fans get to Brazil, they'll be able to look up bus and train info for all twelve cities with scheduled games.